Mine is - Algorithm. Ever since people have learned some of the inner workings of how content is suggested to them, that became the new spammed word that easily got exhausted within the week of it being used.
Yeah, an algorithm does indeed pitch you things of what to watch or listen to. But there’s more going on than that, but people all the time just stop at that word and expect everyone to suddenly understand it. Sadly, most people just buy it at face value.
Maybe a slight tangent, but it drives me insane when I see/hear people do the following in scripted or written content.
The normal, very casual sentence structure could be “Chocolate cake, which I am quite partial to…” but they will flip it around, which is usually fine, but they do it in a way that doesn’t make sense with the words used. They’ll do something like “Chocolate cake, of which I am quite partial to”. (Where the correct rearrangement would be “to which I am quite partial”)
I know its nitpicky because I can still perfectly understand their meaning, but it feels like people do it because they want to sound smarter. And that’s fine! I just wish they’d go that tiny step further and learn how to properly use that method of sentence rearrangement! Drives me nuts.
That is all.
I think I disagree with a lot of the comments here. The “trying to sound smart” feeling only really occurs when there’s a mismatch in decorum – someone is trying to appear Higher and More Logical – but that can happen with any word, especially adverbs.
Technically, your argument is fallacious.
“Technically” is a useless crutch word (techy!), and “fallacious” is hella overused outside of formal logic stuff, so here it’s a mismatch in decorum. (What’s the fallacy? Does the other just… disagree with you, or are you using a converse error like A implies B, therefore B implies A?)
Well, you don’t always have to do that, per se, but you can irregardless.
A lot of crutch words are just innocent habits, too. masterspace@lemmy.ca mentioned something like that… though there are always people who up their jargon levels for no reason other than To Be More L33t. and_screw_irregardless
On the other hand, some words commented here are needed. For example, if a reviewer calls Grossman’s The Magicians “erudite”, it fits perfectly – the book
Tap for spoiler
uses a metaphor for an archetypal Harvard. In one word we sum up the cloistered, elite, difficult, rich, status-chasing-ness combined with sophistication the metaphor entails.
Continuing on that feeling of summed-up-in-one-word-ness – what alternatives do we really have for “whataboutism” or the “algorithm” or “milquetoast”? Those words hit hard, they sum things up.
The algorithm is an alt-right pipeline, of course he’ll have that phase.
Great, another video on the most milquetoast youtuber drama I’ve ever heard.
Those words are concise, they roll off the tongue and evoke feeling! Don’t shorten words just to sound more colloquial when you have a choice that really fits! And likewise, equally – don’t be grandiloquent just for the sake of it.
Or else you’ll face floccinaucinihilipilification :3
Yep. Words are meant to be used. There’s usually a pretty clear difference between clear and concise communication and being a thesaurus superstar.
Also, words are fun. There are people that just genuinely like learning about words and their origins.
Perchance
You can’t just say “perchance”!
Irregardless… not a word.
Digress/Digressed
“woke”
milquetoast
This one amuses me. It looks all fancy in writing. But if someone says “milk toast” and you don’t know what it means, they just sound like an idiot.
“debunked”
minutiae
Milquetoast, vice versa, vice-sa versa (sic), erudite, illucidate, confusing size for importance (saying big meeting instead of important meeting), commensurate, je no se qua, anything in Latin, anything in another language, latent space, probability space. We use lots of techniques to try to punch-up our perceived intelligence, neurotypical people do it sometimes because they have a tendancy to associate station in a hierarchy with “good traits” like intelligence and use these smart sounding words to try to project authority… ? Maybe? Sometimes I use smart sounding words to talk over/around people when I don’t want to engage them for whatever reason. People after weird. I think it’s easy to see when people are dumber than you, and much harder to see when people are smarter that you; especially the degree to which (to which, being another smart sounding word particle. Particle when used to ike this, another smartness showing phrase.) they are smarter than you. My rule of thumb is that if someone’s dumb, that’s easy for you to tell, but if you can’t tell that they are blatantly dumb, they are likely to be at least close to you in intelligence. If they seem smart, they are likely smarter than your best case scenario guess (they are likely smarter than you think). Everything goes out the window when you start talking about people who learned English as not their first language. Also acronyms.
Interesting that you list vice versa. What do you typically use instead?
If I needed to say something in a two item list and wanted to say that the list could work either way, I would say something like,“meat and potatoes or potatoes and meat, either way” so I would be restating the list in the opposite order. But I also use the words vice versa. I just noticed that people say it when they want to sound smart. It’s not like it’s only said in order to sound smart. There are lots of phrases that are short, succinct, and have a very specific situation where they are applicable. These are the phrases that people have a tendency to use to punch up their sentences.
Anodyne.
I think that’s the name of a videogame
A lot of examples people here are giving, are types of doublespeak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP07oyFTRXc
bourgeoisie
Corporate-speak especially on linkedin from the types of users who use it as an influencer platform. “Synergy” for example.
When people use industry specific jargon and acronyms with someone not in their industry.
It is a very simple rule of writing and communication. You never just use an acronym out of nowhere, you write it out in full the first time and explain the acronym, and then after that you can use it.
Artificial diamonds can be made with a High Temperature, High Pressure (HTHP) process, or a …
Doctors, military folk, lawyers, and technical people of all variety are often awful at just throwing out an acronym or technical term that you literally have no way of knowing.
Usually though, I don’t think it’s a conscious effort to sound smart. Sometimes, it’s just people who are used to talking only with their coworkers / inner circle and just aren’t thinking about the fact that you don’t have the same context, sometimes it’s people who are feeling nervous / insecure and are subconsciously using fancy terms to sound like they fit in, and sometimes it’s people using specific terminology to hide the fact that they don’t actually understand the concepts well enough to break them down further.
I do this alot but I alway follow up with “Do you know what blah is?” and depending on age/experience/acronym or term I ask them to explain it.
Sometimes I get assigned work with a senior engineer(where I learn) and sometimes I get asked to help a new person. For example right now I’m in a project being driven by a senior engineer but was asked to assist a professional development program employee(or pdp) to actually execute the project. As a result this is the habit I developed to 1. Make sure I don’t confuse people with random acronyms or terms 2. Ensure we are on the same regarding definition(and they are not just saying yes I know when they don’t).
